by C. Vandergraff/Rick McBride 1981
You know the poster. Even if you don’t know you know it, you know it.
“Decisions, Decisions” the 1981 C. Vandergraff/Rick McBride photograph
commissioned by three Ferrari dealers in Southern California. Three objects, evenly
spaced, photographed in low light against a black background. A Ferrari 308 GTB. A
bottle of Chateau Lafite. The silhouette of a woman.
It was the poster that defined a certain kind of 80s aspiration. The poster was
about choice. The fantasy wasn’t owning one of the three. The fantasy was having all
three in front of you and having to decide. The car, the wine, the woman. Speed, taste,
desire. The holy trinity of a very specific, very male, very 1981 vision of the good life or
what could be today.
What I Did
The Ferrari was replaced with a vacuum. Not any vacuum. A Dyson. The one with the
translucent cyclones, the purple ball, the curves that don’t belong on a household
appliance. The one that James Dyson spent 5,127 prototypes developing, not because
he was trying to make a sexier vacuum, but because he was an industrial designer who
refused to accept that a vacuum had to look like a vacuum.
The woman remains. The wine remains. The Dyson sits where the Ferrari used to be.
The question is why?
The Dyson Became a Sexy Object
The translucent cyclones are the obvious move. You can see the dust spinning. The
machine reveals its function. That’s industrial design as honesty, the same impulse that
puts a sapphire case back on a Swiss mechanical watch. What’s happening inside is
beautiful, so why hide it?
The result is a household appliance that people leave out. Not in the closet. Not in the
garage. In the kitchen. In the hallway. Visible. Because it looks like something.
That’s the first thing a Dyson and a Ferrari 308 GTB share: they’re both objects
designed to be seen.
The Ferrari’s Pininfarina bodywork wasn’t shaped purely for aerodynamics. It was
shaped to make you feel something when you looked at it. The Dyson’s cyclone
assembly wasn’t made transparent purely for function. It was made transparent
because watching dust spin at 924 mph is viscerally satisfying.
The Joke That Isn’t a Joke
Replacing a Ferrari with a Dyson in a poster about desire and choice is funny. I’m
aware. The poster that once asked you to choose between speed, taste, and sex now
asks you to choose between a vacuum cleaner, a bottle of wine, and a woman. The
absurdity is the point.
But the joke has a second layer, and that layer is the argument.
The original poster was about a fantasy that was never available to most people. A
Ferrari 308 GTB cost about $60,000 in 1981 — roughly $200,000 today. The poster was
aspiration as aspiration: look at this life you will never have. It was commissioned by
Ferrari dealers, not Ferrari owners. The target audience was people who would put the
poster on their wall, not people who would put the car in their garage.
The LaidFactor version swaps in an object that’s actually attainable. A Dyson costs a
few hundred dollars. It lives in your house. You use it. It’s not a fantasy. It’s a real object
that earned its place through design and function — not through a price tag that makes
it impossible.
And here’s the thing the original poster never admitted: the woman and the wine were
always the real objects of desire. The Ferrari was the excuse. Nobody buying that
poster was in the market for a 308. They were in the market for the feeling the poster
sold, sophistication, choice, abundance. The LaidFactor version says: you can have that
feeling with a well-designed vacuum. Not because a vacuum is a car but rather because
the feeling was never about the car.
Laidfactor Comment: The LaidFactor framework is about identifying objects with
enduring value in a disposable world. The original “Decisions, Decisions” poster was
about objects with fantasy value; the car you’ll never drive, the wine you’ll never taste,
the woman you’ll never meet.
The LaidFactor version is about objects with real value. A Dyson vacuum is a genuinely
well-designed tool that makes a mundane task less miserable. A bottle of good wine is a
genuine pleasure. And the woman, well, some things don’t need explaining.
The image is a joke. It’s also a thesis statement. The good life isn’t about the Ferrari you
can’t afford. It’s about the well-made things you actually live with. The Dyson earned its
place in the frame not by being expensive, but by being excellent. That’s the whole
point. The Dyson is a poster of something you might actually buy, use, and, against all
logic, enjoy looking at. That’s the ratio. That’s the lens. — LF
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